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What I would buy at Head for the Hills

The latest show at Art Discovered in Grass Valley was a group of artists afiliated with Luna Rienne Gallery in San Francisco. The show featured works by NoMe Edonna, Telopa, Ursula X Young, Romanowski, Eric Otto, Evan Venagas, Ruben Rude.

Romanowski, a Swiss/San Franciscan scavenger of wooden detritus, bends time and tone by putting them in a box. He has reframed the frame. He has dissected and resurrected all the wood in your life so that every detail is vaguely familiar but unplaceable. They are studies of the past, certainly melancholic, but also happily and humorously repurposed. The old picture frames, bed posts, violins, crown moldings are organized, almost filed away. He fills in the gaps with words, with half hidden drawings. They have a haunted quality that reminds me of Joseph Cornell. Had I the money, I certainly would have purchased “Wingspan”.

Ursula X Young was recently featured in the SN&R in Sacramento for her murals . She has a love affair with wistful women and frolicking city scapes. She has also successfully tried her hand at specializing in children’s bed room murals. My daughter has a dreamy view of rural heaven when she wakes up thanks to Ursula: cows, dragonflies, clouds.

I have to say it: NoMe Edonna is a mindfuck. Really, the guy is at once absurd and technically truthful. His canvases were little in this show, but they glowed like TVs. The aliens are probably studying his stuff with their intergalactic satellites. Or maybe just sending him signals.

Ruben Rude, I am not moved. I’ve seen it. Rudes’ work evokes two or three versions of sad. And by then I have lost interest. I have sad, I get sad, I fight sad every day, I don’t need it in my living room. If you are looking for that particular style of street Doze Green has more range, more glyph, more radiance and more fun.

Telopa, like Young, does portraits of women. His stories are draped with staged symbolism, a still life super-imposed on a cartoonish real life. Each painting presents something that should not be. Despite their cartoonish beauty the withering glance of his subjects are nothing you would want to encounter in real life. I have the sense he has spent alot of time staring at Kahlo. As he should. Remember that portrait in Vertigo? Yeah, like that but creepier.

Appearances by other local talent included painters Oliver Vernon, Doze Green and Sarah Coleman. DJ Shnezzy in the house. it was a respectable turnout as usual. This stuff us good enough that it should fly off the walls.